This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, December 04, 2006

Awkward Seating

In today's Inside Higher Ed, UD's blogpal, Ralph Luker, notes that "this has been an unusually troubled year for endowed chairs in American higher education." From Enron to Stephen Ambrose, embarrassing organizations and people have endowed august positions at American universities, causing problems for the schools.

Yet one should put things in perspective. It's unlikely, writes Ralph, that "any American institution will ever have to decide whether to create the Adolph Hitler Chair in Holocaust Studies" (this example makes UD wonder whether Ralph has been reading Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise). Some endowed chairs honor slightly to extremely icky people and things, admittedly; but universities should accept most of the chairs anyway and "put the money to good work."
Posted at: 12/04/2006 08:56:00 AM